Sidney Crosby was going to score. He was playing too well and coming too close to not. Hockey has an unpleasant way of making guys like him wait, though, and he hadn’t managed it for eight full games before Monday night. He was staying on the right side of the puck, and drawing tough assignments, but the production, relatively speaking, wasn’t quite there.

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“I think Sidney’s dry spell is most players’ hot spell,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said on Sunday — and he’s right.

Through sheer, dumb luck, and because the universe sometimes shows a sense of humor, it all went down a period and change after NBCSN’s Jeremy Roenick called him out on national television. Crosby bent a from-his-knees one-timer past Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy to give his team a 3-2 win and tie the Eastern Conference finals at one game apiece.

Somewhere in Connecticut, Roenick was feeling more satisfied with himself than usual.

“If I were Sidney Crosby right now,” he said after the second period. “I’d watch the work ethic that Jonathan Drouin has on a nightly basis.”

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Forget that guys like Roenick had spent months intermittently bagging on Drouin, who had the audacity to realize that he was a good player in a crappy situation and demand — ineffectively, as yet — a trade out of Tampa Bay. This was hockey conventionalism eating itself; When is it OK to praise Jonathan Drouin? When it’s at the expense of your sport’s biggest star.

Ignore how hard it is to believe that Roenick could earnestly believe something like that, too; his job is to make good TV, and he’s trying.

What we should all do is bask in the absurdity of it all; Sidney Crosby has exactly nothing to learn about hockey from Jonathan Drouin — or, for that matter, Jeremy Roenick, or you, or me. And if he’d played a subpar first two periods — mind you, he was one of the best few saves of the playoffs away from putting Pittsburgh up in the second and killing Roenick’s laugh line before it had a chance to live — he was the best player on the ice for the next 20 minutes and 40 seconds.

He came a literal inch away from another one in the third; Vasilevskiy managed to get the shaft of his stick on another of Crosby’s shots.

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“I wasn’t happy, but I think that the big thing was there were some real good chances there. The backhands, half the net, (Vasilevskiy) made a great save,” Crosby said. “I think with chances like that, you’re encouraged you’re getting them. The whole third period, I thought every line generated a lot.

“So I think that gives you a good mindset when you’re getting those chances, that eventually something’s going to go in, and you’ve just got to trust that it will. It did, and that feels good. Yeah, but it definitely tests your patience sometimes. You’ve just got to focus on going back out there and trying to create.”

In overtime, on a set-up by Bryan Rust, there was nothing left for Vasilevskiy to do. Rust was playing with Crosby after a midgame shake-up by coach Mike Sullivan, spurred, probably, by the ineffectiveness of Conor Sheary and Chris Kunitz.

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And Rust, to be charitable, is usually the guy looking to get set up, not the trigger man himself. The reason he got the puck to Crosby is simple enough.

“When a guy like that’s yelling at you and he’s wide-open for a one-timer, I think you give him the puck,” Rust said.

So, there. Streak snapped. “Sidney Crosby has never scored an overtime playoff goal” reminders rendered useless.

Sid the Kid. (Getty Images)

It’s really, really hard to score. In the playoffs, when whistles get swallowed and skill is neutralized, it gets even tougher. Over six-, eight-, 10-game sample sizes, sometimes it’s just not going to happen.

The shot Crosby buried Monday was the sort that keeps people quiet for a little. Jonathan Toews has built a reputation on going scoresheet-dormant for series at a time, then managing a huge one. In the meantime, like Crosby, he does everything else right — with a Drouin-like verve, even — and then the clock resets, and the wolves are kept at bay.

“That’s a huge goal for our team, and that was the perfect play to get it, too," usual linemate Patric Hornqvist said afterward. Maybe someone had clued him on Roenick’s goofiness, maybe not — but what Hornqvist said next was applicable to a lot of folks.

“The media, you guys are all over (Crosby), and I think he’s top five in scoring in the playoffs,” Hornqvist said. “Now he gets the big one, the biggest one of the year, and we’ll see what happens.”

Then Hornqvist winked. Exactly why is unknowable, but you can probably make a guess. Kris Letang was more direct.

“We don’t care about (his) production in the playoff," Letang said, “He’s getting pressured a lot by their D, he’s playing against (the other team’s) top line every night, he makes a lot of room for us on the ice to make more plays. Eventually it’s going to come.”

It already has.